


Skip

by greygerbil



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mary Morstan is Sebastian Moran
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 16:04:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4712021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary gets a carefully worded spam e-mail that calls out to someone she wants to be again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skip

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a kinkmeme prompt that wanted Mary to be Sebastian.

“Don’t move.”

Jim let the door fall shut behind himself, hand hovering over the handle still. He looked at Mary. She stood at the other end of the hallway. Her fingers were still as stone around the grip of the gun that she had trained on his head. From the distance, she couldn’t read his expression. The shirt he wore was crumpled, his jeans faded, hair in unfashionable disarray. He had lost weight and there had never been much extra on him, anyway, leaving him looking haggard and worse for the wear.

_Good._

Her finger found the trigger. If she hadn’t had the one-hour drive after she had read the bloody e-mail, time to sort out her thoughts and calm down, if he’d walked right in after she’d decrypted it, he would be dead, but of course he had probably known that, hence the out-of-the-way location. Skip code messages had always made her want to throw phones at the walls because of course Jim had always switched up the code and more than once she’d been running from whoever he had her piss off that day trying to do logic puzzles in her head and shoot straight at the same time. Jim knew all that, too, and because he was insufferable, he had picked the coding method she hated most and was best trained in.

Mary had almost deleted the e-mail as spam until she saw that it had been sent by one Sebastian M. Her heart had dropped into her stomach like a brick.

She hadn’t seen the name, her name, the alias she liked so much she couldn’t bear to change it completely (Moran to Morstan – stupid sentimentality), for two years. But it would always be infinitely more familiar than Mary.

“ **Important** information for you! **Meet** Prince Charming for **real**. Find a good **boyfriend** with speeddating every **Friday**. Yes, climb the **hill** and find the **street** to happiness. Call **Monday** to Sunday 9:00 – **22:00**. We do private **in-house** consultations often, 24 **7**. There is no **waiting** with our agency. **For** us, the customer, **you** , is king.”

Mary had left a note on the kitchen table for John. She had forgotten what she had written the moment she had put it down – groceries, friends, something. She had sped past red lights to make it to Friday Hill Street, a suburban road lined at both sides with identical brown two-story houses. A row of same-sized trees grew in the middle of the street between the lanes, every front yard’s grass was neatly cut. It was as orderly as her life had become.

Leave it to Jim to blow apart any semblance of normalcy constructed over a year with a single e-mail. She had found house number seven empty, under construction, and had climbed in through a window without glass, tearing the thick plastic cover with the switchblade she always kept concealed under the slight bulge of her belt (the first time she had threatened Jim with it, he had clapped his hands and crooned in surprise at how well-hidden it had been, unnoticable even to him).

And now, here she was, and here was Jim Moriarty, the dead man.

“Give me one good reason not to shoot you,” she said.

“Just one?” Jim shrugged his slim shoulders. “You have narrowed eyes. You’re not wearing your contacts. You don’t know if you’ll make a clean killshot from fifteen feet away.”

She’d lost one in her hurry to leave the house and not bothered with it because her boyfriend of four years, her dead boyfriend of two years, had made a sudden reappearance. The bloody bastard.

“Maybe I’d be happy to let you go down in a haze of bullets.”

Like he was asking her to a dance, Jim held out his hand, palm up.

“You could simply come closer,” he sing-songed with a ridiculously bright smile.

Mary shot a hole in the wall fifteen inches next to his head. She could do that much without contacts.

Jim grimaced, coughing as the broken plaster spit a small cloud of dust at him. “Whoopsie.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jim looked bored, which made her refocus her sights between his eyes as best she could. She could still murder him without contacts. All things considered, he deserved a messy death.

“I almost died a hundred times the last couple of years. If I’d had you along, it would have made disappearing twice as difficult – and let me tell you, darling, it wasn’t exactly easy.” He dragged the last word out in a falsetto. “You would have been a target, even just knowing. Divide and survive.” His tone turned bemused. “Especially with that new boy toy of yours.”

Slowly, Mary took the first step towards him, then another. The gun was still pointing at Jim’s forehead.

“Why shouldn’t I be very happy with John?”

“Oh, yes, yes, that seems likely,” Jim said. “If you didn’t have any ulterior motives, you must’ve met accidentally, then. The world is small, isn’t it?”

Mary took another step.

“Without your missions, I had a bit of free time,” she said tightly. “I figured I might as well try and figure out a way to get to Mycroft.”

“Darling, how stereotypical. You were going to avenge me?” Jim teased, gleefully, and he was right, which made her want to shoot him more. “Of course, as ordinary goes, at least your version is entertaining: you decided to slay the British Government for want of something better to do. You were always quite the woman, _Sebastian_.”

“And you are still nothing but a psychopath who thinks too highly of himself.”

She never did figure out how many of his occasional compliments Jim meant. It didn’t matter in the end, she supposed. Trying to compare Jim’s feelings to those of a normal human was trying to measure temperatures in pounds and stone. Something in his head didn’t line up quite right.

“Isn’t it so nice,” another hiccup in tone, upwards, almost tittering, “that we keep up our own separate hobbies? Makes a relationship so much more interesting.”

“As you’ve pointed out, I’m engaged to John Watson.”

“Congratulations!” Jim said enthusiastically. “Really, yeah, I do hope to get an invitation to the wedding...” His voice trailed off. “There’s easier ways to get to Mycroft Holmes, you know.”

“I’ll work my way up to him. I have my sights on a different target right now.”

“Oh, yes,” Jim said with a sigh. “Good ol’ Sherlock. It would be a shame to see him end like that, though, now that we both managed to make it past the first round. Now is when things get _interesting_.”

Mary frowned, knuckles white as she kept clutching the gun.

“Won’t you play the game my way, Sebastian?” Jim said softly.

Mary knew that voice. She’d paused too long and something in her face had probably twitched and now Jim had spotted the crack where he could wriggle his fingers in and pry.

She took another step forward, all lines becoming clear now, the arch of his lips, his dark, dark eyes. The game. Mary had always rolled her eyes, mocked, joked. Jim Moriarty and his great game. But when you had been a player and pawn for so many years, like herself...

“I thought of you when I was picking out curtains with John. I figured living like that... this must be what it’s like to be you around the rest of us.” A bitter smile.

“You’re considering not killing Sherlock,” Jim noted.

Mary felt a new wave of anger and that twisted admiring affection for his genius that could read the meaning before she had unearthed it from between her lines herself.

“You’ve been bored,” Jim continued.

John had been bored, too. Maybe that was the one thing they used to have in common, that she had actually liked about this unremarkable, tedious little man. But even when Sherlock had returned, what they did was so terribly _quaint_. Mary had often found herself remembering a morning three years ago. Jim had woken her with atrocious pop music, throwing her travel clothes into her lap as she blinked herself awake. He had told her that he had blown up the US embassy in North Korea, but all of this (what?) wouldn’t work out if they didn’t go to Namibia now so she could shoot some top dog mobster’s son and they had to get the plane at seven, _get up_.

John was used to adventure. Sebastian was used to scrambling behind a man that was more whirlwind than person, leaving destruction and terror in his erratic path. It would drive you mad in a week if you couldn’t handle it. If you could, nothing in the world compared.

“Believe me, Sherlock is not as interesting as you think he is.”

“I can make him fun to play with again if you let him live.”

Jim smiled. His hand was still outstretched. Sebastian closed in, finally, lowered the gun on Jim’s wrist, pushing his hand down, and leaned forward to kiss him.

She separated a little when she shot him in the foot – wouldn’t want to get bitten. Jim hissed in pain.

“Shut up,” Sebastian said. “You knew I would do that.”

For a moment, Jim obviously considered whinging, but she raised a brow at him and he relented, a grin tugging at his lips.

“I wasn’t so sure whether it would be the foot or the knee. But that is why I like to having you around, honey. You surprise me,” he said, slightly breathless with pain.

“It’s going to be a much closer call for Sherlock,” Sebastian said.

“You’re a good shot. I have faith in you.”

Sebastian understood the two sentences as separate, like Jim had meant them. It wasn’t faith in her ability to shoot. She had snuffed out many, many people for him. He didn’t need faith to know she could kill.

_I know you won’t miss whatever you want to hit. I have faith that you’ll listen to me and keep him alive._

And why, she probably would, just to see what he had planned for Sherlock, and for herself. For all his faults, no one knew how to entertain a lady like Jim Moriarty.


End file.
